gogoyoko

» see gogoyoko.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

gogoyoko was founded in downtown Reykjavik in December 2007 by two musicians, Haukur Magnússon and Pétur Úlfur Einarsson. The third name on the founding list is the interesting one: Reynir Harðarson, a co-founder of CCP Games and the original art director of EVE Online, who was also one of the owners. An alpha opened on 15 November 2008, a beta went out to everyone in Iceland on 1 May 2009, and on 1 October 2009 the site opened across Scandinavia. Everywhere else you needed an invitation.

What it sold was a position. Artists and labels set their own prices, and gogoyoko kept ten percent of a download and passed the rest back after tax and royalties. Forty percent of advertising revenue was split among rights holders pro rata by how much they had been streamed. Every track on the site streamed free, subsidized by the ads in the store. Icelandic copyright law meant artists could not legally give songs away for nothing, which is the sort of constraint that only shows up when a music startup is run by people who actually live somewhere specific.

In 2013 the financial trouble that had been building caught up. The entire staff was laid off and the management changed, which the Reykjavik Grapevine reported in October under the headline that gogoyoko was in trouble. The service stopped some time after that. By May 2014 the site was serving a closure page, and it was still serving one a year later.

~ the chronicle ~

~ fair play in music ~

The slogan was "Fair play in music" and the company meant it as a business model rather than a mood. It pledged a tenth of all advertising revenue to charity and let artists route part of their own earnings the same way. The partners included UNICEF Iceland and Médecins Sans Frontières. In January 2010 a gogoyoko concert with UNICEF Iceland raised 250,000 krónur for Haitian relief, which is about two thousand dollars.

gogoyoko was not the only outfit using the phrase. The Featured Artists' Coalition in Britain, with Radiohead and Iron Maiden among its members, was running a campaign on the same words at the same time. The difference is that the Coalition was lobbying and gogoyoko was trying to build the thing and pay for it out of a ten percent cut.

~ the shop and the profile ~

Underneath the politics it was two products stapled together. One was a store where artists could sell through a customized storefront and an embeddable widget player, watch sales and streams in real time, and get paid by bank transfer every quarter. The other was a social network, where fans and artists kept profiles and wrote reviews that fed the recommendation engine. It scrobbled out to Last.fm.

Because the catalog leaned hard into Icelandic and Nordic independent music, the recommendations landed a long way from anything Amazon MP3 or iTunes put in front of you in 2010. That was the point, and it was also the ceiling: depth in Icelandic underground music comes with a known maximum number of customers.

~ the long goodbye ~

The closure page was not even a closure page. It was an "under construction" graphic: the gogoyoko wordmark in pale gray over a line reading that the site was under construction and temporarily closed. The archive caught it on 17 May 2014, and it was still the whole of gogoyoko.com on 1 May 2015, almost a year later. By December 2016 the domain was not answering at all.

Somebody kept paying for hosting long enough to leave a sign up saying this was temporary, which it was not. That gray wordmark is the only logo gogoyoko has left anywhere.

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